Archive for the ‘Science Fiction and Space Shit’ Category
Thursday, June 4th, 2026
THE ARRIVAL is a mid-budget summer of ’96 sci-fi movie written and directed by David Twohy, who already had writing credits on CRITTERS 2: THE MAIN COURSE, WARLOCK, THE FUGITIVE (no big deal), TERMINAL VELOCITY and WATERWORLD, but had only directed TIMESCAPE (1992) starring Jeff Daniels. He wrote this specifically for Charlie Sheen (GRIZZLY II: REVENGE, NEVER ON TUESDAY, DEADFALL), who plays sort of against type as Zane Zaminsky, SETI researcher. I mean, he’s 99% regular Charlie Sheen, but I think he’s trying to throw some nerd into the mix. He has horn-rimmed glasses and perfectly spiked hair like D-FENS from FALLING DOWN, but he completes the look with a precisely sculpted goatee.
This was from a period between SPECIES (1995) and CONTACT (1997) when sci-fi movies were really interested in the brave scientific heroes who sit patiently at those giant satellite dish things listening for messages from space. Just in case. TWISTER’s hot shot storm chasers would give them the Dawn Wiener treatment, but they are important in their own way, and also think they’re cool because they like to howl like wolves and they’re good at rolling their office chairs back and forth between different computers.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: aliens, Buddy Joe Hooker, Charlie Sheen, David Twohy, Leon Rippy, Lindsay Crouse, Richard Schiff, Ron Silver, SETI, Teri Polo, Tony T. Johnson
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2026
THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU is kind of a different approach to a Star Wars picture: a small, standalone adventure. The fate of the galaxy is not at stake, there is no chosen one, no prophecy. It’s not even a prequel or an origin story. Coming from the popular Disney+ series The Mandalorian has given people the impression that it requires homework, but I assure you there is nothing at all you need to know that’s not there in the movie. It’s just one story about the titular bounty hunters on a mission, and not the mission that changed it all. Just a mission. To misquote M. Bison, it’s not the most important day of your life. It’s just Tuesday.
So it’s in the same world I love visiting in that epic space opera, but truly it’s a western or a samurai movie. That’s what I like about the show too, and I was skeptical about turning it into a movie instead of doing another season, but it turns out it’s fun to see these guys in one contained story with movie level production values. It’s light on the force, but high on some of the other things I love in Star Wars: a bunch of fantastical settings, outlandish creatures and robots, lots of them animated, some puppets, even some stop motion by Phil Tippet Studios. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brendan Wayne, Dave Filoni, Hemky Madera, Jeremy Allen White, Jon Favreau, Lateef Crowder, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Pascal, Phil Tippet, Sigourney Weaver, space western, Star Wars
Posted in Action, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 32 Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2026
SPACE SWEEPERS is a South Korean movie from 2021 that I first watched in February of 2022. I know that because when I went to save this document I discovered the partial review I wrote back then, but got too busy to finish. Recently I was thinking about the movie, watched it again, and I’m excited to share it with anyone who missed it. (It’s on Netflix.)
This is in that sub-genre I love that some call “space truckers” – a sci-fi fantasy about a working class crew doing a space job in their junky, jerry-rigged but beloved space-hooptie. It’s both their vehicle and their home, a cramped quarters but with a plant and other items of comfort, a small kitchen, a table for playing cards. They’re a ragtag crew of good-hearted rejects like you get in SPACE ADVENTURE COBRA, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, Cowboy Bebop, SPACE TRUCKERS, SERENITY, etc., but this time the world they inhabit is a very pointed, acidic portrait of our current capitalistic hellscape. Four years ago it seemed very of-the-moment, and now it seems even more accurate than it did then. The truth hurts, but director Jo Sung-hee (A WEREWOLF BOY, PHANTOM DETECTIVE) still manage to make a fun popcorn movie about it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jin Seon-kyu, Jo Sung-hee, Kim Tai-ri, Korean cinema, Richard Armitage, Song Joon-ki, space truckers, Yoo Hae-jin
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 13th, 2026
Taken on its own, ÆON FLUX (2005) is an interesting oddity among post-MATRIX techno-soundtrack sci-fi action movies. The look is clean and brightly lit, the premise is vague, it has some legitimately strange tech and costumes. One of its shootouts happens in a rose garden, another on a manicured lawn beneath blossoming cherry trees. A major third act action set piece involves hanging from and climbing up the gold-lame-scarf tail of a blimp called “The Relical.” To date I think it might be the only movie with a Relical in it.
It’s an MTV Films production, but’s that just because it’s based on a cartoon birthed by their envelope-pushing animation anthology Liquid Television. It doesn’t have any needle drops and doesn’t seem fully invested in being of the time, or of pop culture. If not for the generic beats in the score by Graeme Revell (MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE) it would feel pretty otherworldly. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Jonny Lee Miller, Karyn Kusama, live action remake of cartoon, Martin Csokas, Matt Manfredi, MTV Productions, Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Chung, Phil Hay, Sophie Okonedo
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »
Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
PROJECT HAIL MARY is a nice crowd pleasing sci-fi movie based on a book by Andy Weir, same author as THE MARTIAN. It’s directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, the team who directed 21 JUMP STREET, produced SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE and got fired from SOLO. It’s a huge hit, some people are talking it up like it’s Important, and it’s the closest thing Lord & Miller have done to a classy grown-up movie, so time will tell if it sends them on a catastrophic Adam McKay type trajectory. But right now we’re good. It’s a movie with lots of laughs and a lovable alien. People just get emotional about astronauts, I think.
Ryan Gosling (director of LOST RIVER) stars as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who accidentally winds up shouldering the responsibility of keeping the entire earth and at least one other planet from becoming uninhabitable. It’s kind of a long story doled out in episodic flashbacks, but an against-the-grain paper he wrote in a former life as a molecular biologist leads to him being one of numerous scientists recruited by a top secret international program to stop the crisis of single-celled alien organisms they call “astrophages” from blotting out the sun. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andy Weir, Chris Miller, Drew Goddard, Greig Fraser, Ken Leung, Milana Vayntrub, Phil Lord, Ryan Gosling, Sandra Huller
Posted in Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 16 Comments »
Wednesday, March 25th, 2026
JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH is one of those sequel titles referring more to the series itself than the story. I think the only rebirth is that it’s new characters and storyline, you don’t need to remember any previous entries. They really exhausted all the bringing-back-characters gimmicks in the last couple so this is an all new cast with only one unobtrusive mention of one of them studying under part 1’s Alan Grant.
Scenario-wise it’s similar to THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK and JURASSIC PARK III. There’s no theme park, just a small team sent on a mission to an area where leftover dinos created on a separate island run wild. Since it’s set after three JURASSIC WORLD movies the world is used to and bored of dinosaurs, they get into cities sometimes and it’s not a huge deal, there are genetically altered breeds and mutations created for entertainment purposes. But mostly this is set at the equator, where travel is illegal due to dangerous wild dinosaurs, and on an abandoned R&D island, so it’s not that different from any other chapter. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: David Iacono, David Koepp, dinosaurs, Ed Skrein, Gareth Edwards, Jonathan Bailey, Luna Blaise, Mahershala Ali, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Rupert Friend, Scarlett Johansson
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 90 Comments »
Tuesday, March 24th, 2026
In 2017 there was a straight-to-Netflix movie called WAR MACHINE, a satire about the war in Afghanistan. I was interested because it was from director David Michôd (ANIMAL KINGDOM, THE ROVER, later CHRISTY), but I still haven’t gotten around to it because it went straight to Netflix, it didn’t seem like a real movie, and I forgot it existed.
Now there’s a 2026 straight-to-Netflix movie also called WAR MACHINE, but it’s about Reacher (Alan Ritchson) fighting a robot. This one also went straight to Netflix, also doesn’t seem like a real movie, so I threw it on casually. Times change I guess.
It starts in Kandahar. They finally ended the war in Afghanistan, but it lives on in the traumatic-incident-flashbacks that open all military-based action movies. Ritchson (DARK WEB: CICADA 3301) plays an unnamed Staff Sergeant with a background in engineering who comes to fix an engine for a stranded convoy. He confronts the person responsible for the engine troubles, played by Jai Courtney (DANGEROUS ANIMALS), in that move where two characters come at each other like they’re angry but then it’s a joke and they’re old pals, or in this case actual brothers. I’ve been thinking of that trope as “the Lando,” but here it sort of serves as a “Dillon you sonofabitch,” because this movie exists very clearly in the shadow of PREDATOR. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ritchson, Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, Jai Courtney, Patrick Hughes, Stephan James
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 16 Comments »
Thursday, March 12th, 2026
Last time I saw THE SALUTE OF THE JUGGER it was called THE BLOOD OF HEROES. That only version available in the U.S. was about ten minutes shorter, but still kinda legendary as a slept-on gem by some of us. That version was recently put in its proper place as bonus material for the original 104 minute Australian version on a 4K/blu-ray combo from Umbrella Entertainment.
It’s written and directed by David Webb Peoples, his only time directing a feature, but he’d written BLADE RUNNER and went on to write UNFORGIVEN, 12 MONKEYS and SOLDIER. Not a bad run. This one has a bit of the sci-fi and a bit of the western, because its heroes (blood and all) are travelers in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But mostly it’s a sports movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Katarina, Australian cinema, Cecilia Wong, David Webb Peoples, Delroy Lindo, Gandhi MacIntyre, Guy Norris, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Joan Chen, Justin Monjo, Max Fairchild, post-apocalypse, Richard Norton, Rutger Hauer, Todd Boekelheide, Vincent D'Onofrio
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit, Sport | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, March 10th, 2026
As a fan of writer/director Steven Kostanski’s last three movies, PSYCHO GOREMAN, FRANKIE FREAKO and DEATHSTALKER, I decided it was time to check out one of his older works. MANBORG is his first feature, released in 2011. He had already done several shorts (best title: Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Laser Cove) while working in the makeup departments of larger productions including CAPOTE and TAMARA.
I would say MANBORG is a tongue-in-cheek movie played with a slightly straighter face than the other three Kostanskis I’ve seen, or at least with fewer straight up jokes. So it’s maybe his purest example of what I think of as a movie in quotes – a feature film that plays more like it’s saying “wouldn’t it be funny if there was a movie like this?” than like it actually is that movie. To enjoy it is to play along and pretend that it is. (And I did enjoy it.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Astron-6, Conor Sweeney, Kyle Hebert, Steven Kostanski
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026
TRANCERS II: THE RETURN OF JACK DETH is a DTV sequel that came out in 1991, six years after the original TRANCERS, and four years after the at-that-time-unreleased anthology short TRANCERS: CITY OF LOST ANGELS. The cop from the future was now starting to be a relic of the past, like he’d always dreamed.
A new screenwriter, Jackson Barr (BODY CHEMISTRY, SUBSPECIES, ROBOT WARS, MANDROID) joins director Charles Band (PARASITE), but otherwise everybody is back. Tim Thomerson (between an episode of The Flash and an episode of Baywatch) is Jack Deth, the time traveling future cop now well established as an old-timey private eye in 1991 Los Angeles. Despite the subtitle he’s not returning from anywhere, he’s just sticking around in the same place. (And he beat BATMAN RETURNS to it by a year.) He’s married to Lena (Helen Hunt, a year before starting Mad About You) and they live in a mansion with Hap Ashby (Biff Manard, DESERT KICKBOXER), the former MLB player they saved from homelessness. In the intervening years Hap “made a pile of money” on “commodities speculation” and now collects firetrucks (?!).
The biggest tension in Jack and Lena’s relationship is that Lena wants them to buy their own house to settle down and have a kid in. Gone are her punk rock days. She wears bland ‘90s jeans and has regular-colored hair. She looks like Helen Hunt, actually. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alyson Croft, Art LaFleur, Barbara Crampton, Biff Manard, Charles Band, Full Moon Entertainment, Helen Hunt, Jackson Barr, Jeffrey Combs, Martine Beswick, Megan Ward, Richard Lynch, Sonny Carl Davis, Telma Hopkins, Tim Thomerson, time travel
Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »
